I have a friend who creates wonderful worlds in her imagination and makes surrealistic oil and watercolor paintings of them. There are fantasy creatures, magic, illusions and magnificent ancient buildings, and lots of small details to interpret. My friend's paintings are like dreams one sees at night. To capture a dream... it was always what I wanted to do myself and wasn't able to.

I've been a reader of Lubov's blog for a long time. I love her paintings, her bizarre worlds, her captured dreams. And it was very sad to see such a talented person depressed and lacking faith in herself. She thought nobody needed her art, nobody cared for it, nobody wanted it. Then I came with an idea to upload scans of her paintings to Dreamstime, so they can be bought and travel...

I learned that photos and drawings can be sold through the Internet somehow about 8 years ago (I was 17 years old), don't recall any agencies of that time though. I tried my luck in microstock as soon as I managed to buy my first camera (I was 20 at the moment). I don't really remember what's my first agency was but it was not DT, I'm sure. My camera was a very simple and cheap one and photos appeared to be far from good quality, none were accepted. So I gave up and forgot about the idea I liked so much.

I became interested in microstock again when I began to draw (I'm a very late beginner, was about 20 or 21 when started), but a dream remained a dream until all pieces of the puzzle joined together. It took time...

To Gsteve.Sorry, I've been looking everywhere, but couldn't find the source photo. I remember it to be of a very bad quality, so probably I've deleted if from my computer long time ago.But I still have the white cat :) and can make a new photo if needed and make a collage with your text then.

Hello.Do you have the original image of the cat that you used for this image 9499366.That's the cover of a book in Switzerland. But I wanted to put text in French, that's why I need the image. I love your images of pictorial typography, I am passionate about this art, and I've already done a study on this subject.Thank you.

your pictures is very creative( I don't now another word wich could describe your images}!my story is like yours. when I started on DT I now nothing about photography or illustrations, but now I learn much but I have to learn more!

Comments (9)

This article has been read 1453 times. 3 readers have found this article useful.

My portfolio has grown up again. Now it contains 500 images. A great number and a big milestone for me.
Most of these 500 are drawings or collages, and only 56 are photos. Sales are about 70% of portfolio (according to statistics). Not bad, I think)

For me, people are really hard to draw. I'm no professional artist, just a mere amateur. Drawing people is a great challenge for me. I often fail, seldom succeed in it. I usually notice myself trying to avoid people in new picture's composition. Possibility of failure frightens me off.
And now here comes time I'll have to face the problem... I'm on the way to publish my book, the Omnis Trilogy. Having ho money to pay the professional artist I must draw all three covers myself. I managed to avoid drawing people for the first part's cover and drew a curious little dragon instead (that's how the cover looks) , but that will not work with the others.
Cartoonish people...

I agree that practice is the key. Observation helps quite a bit too. Studying human anatomy has helped me, as well as, refining my shading and lighting skills. If you view everything as primitive shapes, it's much easier to create complex graphics.

Did you know most pets are cannibals? They are. I learned that while working at the pet shop. For some reason animals do not think eating others of their own species to be a crime.
When I hear someone say about how bad humans are I always remind of a cute pets at the shop. We, humans, are not so bad as we think, really :) At least we try to become better.

Yes, we use bombs, guns and all that. But we know it is bad anyway. And have a choice :) Animals won't even think of it ever: they will leave or kill their children when they get ill, and eat their own parents when they grow old and weak. They're simple and cruel creatures (from human point of view). So I think humans have a good future.

You've started a philosophical thread here! :-) I've also read that humanity has become less savage over the years... things were worse in the Middle Age but maybe it's just the scale of of destructions it that is so scary today. In any case I like your chicken!

Oh, I'm puzzled with your question... I don't understand what you really mean, but I'll try to guess... I suppose you should take a proper program (like Gimp, it's free) and try to create some pics there. Or just draw on paper and scan drawings then. Pencil drawings do sell too.

Audio tapes and VHS tapes are kind of gone, aren't they! :) We still tape things on a VHS tape, but I know a lot of people switched to Tivo and such.

I remember floppy disks--I even remember the larger floppies that went into A drives. :) Do you guys remember zip drives? I sold some old ones of those a few weeks ago on Amazon since we don't use those anymore. I have a lot of my old files still on floppy and had to buy a drive to plug into my laptop to use them. All my files since 2007 have been on CD though.

A repair guy at my workplace this week had a digital camera that used floppies instead of a memory card. I had never seen anything like that before. He wanted to put the floppy into one of our office computers to look at the photos, but sadly we didn't have one of those drives and my USB plug-in floppy drive was at home. :(

By this moment I have 242 sales, which include different types of images. There are some facts I've found...

1. Artistic pictures like these above that took a great deal of time usually sell very bad (and mostly - by subscription) or don't sell at all. This is a biggest disappointment, to be sure. But there are two exceptions that brought me 21$ and 18$ when others - zero or usually 0.42$

2. Sketches sell surprisingly well, even when their colored variants have no sales at all.

3. Borders and frames sell well if hand drawn and don't sell at all if they are collage or vector

You have cool photos and drawings! I never thought that drawings can be sold like that! I have some drawings myself, so thank you for the idea!
I love your blue cat watching that bird! It`s so cute!
Good luck and many many sales!

There are lots of Russian-speaking people there. It would be wonderful if they had a place to gather and to discuss photo- and art-related questions in their native language. So we started a forum yesterday:
There are 6 people there for that very moment, so everyone is welcome.

I'm mostly an illustrator and have many pencil drawings in my portfolio. They have very different subjects: from fantasy dragons to common landscapes, but it's curious that often they (despite they variety) used to be found by the same keyword - sketch - and bought then. Just a peice of advice for fellow illustrators: if you have pencil drawings in your portfolio, don't forget to add the keyword "sketch" to all of them, this simple action will bring you many sales.

Don't forget words and pictures go great together so make sure you choose some Dreamstime favorite pics to brighten your article. For inspiration, check out the hottest or the most useful blogs on the left.